Stylistic Analysis of the Poem “Lullaby for a Palestinian Child” By Faiz Ahmad Faiz

Abstract

Stylistics, an area in linguistics, plays a key role in understanding the motivated use of diverse lingusitic items, phrase structures, and sytatic structures, and the employment of stylistic devices and sources of foregrounding in a literary text. The paper attempts to analyse the text of the poem ‘Lullaby for a Palestinian Child, written by Faiz Ahmad Faiz, on different levels of stylistics: phonological, morphological and syntactic pragmatic, and graphological level, and the various techniques used for foregrounding, with the aim to explore how the various stylistic devices and sources of foregrounding foregrounds the key themes of the poem. The methods of stylistic analysis put forwarded by Leech (1969) in “Linguistic Guide to English Poetry” and Wales (2001) in “Dictionary of Stylistics” have been employed in the study. The study found that diverse stylistic devices; such as alliteration, consonance, repetition, assonance, rhyme, and cacophony, etc. and various sources of foregrounding; such as parallelism and deviation, have been employed in the poem, which results in the improved musicality of the poem. Moreover, the stylistic devices and the sources of foregrounding bring to the fore the key themes of the poem. The study, thus, hopes to stimulate interest in stylistic research, so that this area in general, and the literary works of Pakistani writers in particular, can be revisited afresh, and the established views can be re-examined.